I've amazed people on several occasions with facts such that "Engish is a germanic language" or that "English can be traced back to Indian Sanskrit and shares an amazing amount of similarities." In the case of the latter, I can cite examples such as that our our English words "right," and "rite" can both be traced back to the Sanskrit word "rita" which has a few related meanings such as law, order, propriety, and truth.

But Heather is right, too. English is a whore among languages. Unlike French, for example, which prizes linguistic purity and decries the intrusion of outside words, English gladly adopts both words and concepts from other languages. This gives English by far the largest vocabulary of any language and has made it pretty much the lingua franca or universal language.